


Gravity Hurts

by furrywing



Category: District 9 (2009)
Genre: Multi, Original Character Death(s), Prequel, Short Stories
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-30
Updated: 2020-07-31
Packaged: 2021-03-05 22:28:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,307
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25602838
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/furrywing/pseuds/furrywing
Summary: For Christopher it was supposed to be the journey of a lifetime. A voyage across the fabled Sky Roads, chasing unknown worlds on a mining expedition. But facing catastrophe, the poleepkwa ship is pulled into Earth's atmosphere with her living cargo.They know something watches them from below, but the doors won't open.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 9





	1. Shipwrecked

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Strange that this isn't explored more often.  
> This is multi chapter but not that long.

Christopher found the first dead two corridors down from his living quarters, slumped against the wall as if in a peaceful respite, head draped forward, gaunt eyes closed. He almost couldn’t believe it, but in death their bladder had relaxed and their long robes were stained dark. It was a detail he would have missed but for the lantern he tightly gripped, hands shaking. Unable to look long, the ring of the blue light carried him forward. Shivering, the young poleepkwa quaked with every step.

It hadn’t meant to be like this, and if you were to scroll back into the ebb of time, Christopher could not recall a single historic catastrophe as devastatingly hopeless and mismanaged in about a thousand years. Even in the most backwater, underfunded missions, from the most irresponsible countries.

That’s what millennia of space travel did for you. Solved all these problems. Created multiple contingencies. Improved upon these absolute fuck ups so they’d never happen again. Particularly on a journey with an etched out itinerary, to mapped but yet to be visited solar systems, following the Sky Roads which were an incredibly safe way to travel, free from the general violence and brutality of space. They weren’t soaring off into the unfamiliar. This ship wasn’t built for traversing any old section of the universe where disaster wouldn’t be such a slap to the face or such a blatant disregard for poleepkwa life. A calculated risk, Christopher might call it.

This ship wasn’t about risk. This was a city unto itself. A migratory one with uncountable siblings scattered across that which was unknown and that which was not.

Otherwise his family would have tried (and probably failed, but that wasn’t the point) to keep his feet firmly on solid, earthen ground. He’d not be traversing a maze, boots echoing on a metal floor rather than muffled on comforting soil, mind a miasma of depression and anger and exhaustion.

And they’d enter the history books now. He’d be telling his children about his own country’s failing, the home planet’s failings, and parents would say this was why interstellar travel was unnecessary and the colonies would laugh and call them old world, and it would all be rather embarrassing to have been a part of.

Or so he thought, in the first days, long before they were pulled into this new planet’s atmosphere.

That embarrassment was soon to be rivalled and blasted apart by something far more memorable and historically significant. If not for the fact his body was starting to shut down, maybe he’d have felt some pride that he was part of something, albeit through an absolute fuck up, that had the potential to shake and reshape the universe.

If he’d known, those first days.

Then came the hunger. Everything else ceased to matter, even embarrassment.

His stomach had long since stopped aching, even without his friend’s trick of tying a sash tightly around his middle to fool his body into thinking it had been fed.

Dignity was ephemeral. Contextual. Maybe you’d hold onto what was culturally congruent long enough to be smug and elitist about it later. Or maybe you’d accept tragedy had the power reset history and make life feel brutally primitive again. Bring back that which was simply a memory, in the worst of ways.

The first memory they knew well, academically, and they knew better. But the sanitation systems had shut off with the lights and old diseases that had long since been eradicated at home had crept back like a dormant bog fire. So the dead who didn't freeze and didn't starve passed from that which had no right existing.

The second had the medics temporarily panicked and perplexed, because it meant there was an external breach somewhere. They were under the atmosphere of a new planet, and as is the risk with all such expeditions, exo-fauna had made its way onto the ship. Novel bacteria, they’d told everyone the obvious, for which they had dwindling resources to treat.

After that, every little injury, every small cut, had the potential to become critically dangerous.

And the third memory? Well, no one who lived in the doomed city had experienced hunger like this.

Pulling his coat tighter to fight the chill and the strange winds that howled through the vast corridors and screamed up into the distant unseen ceilings, Christopher knocked on every closed door he passed, though few remained shut, pressing his antennae close. Just in case. It had become a ritual over the past several weeks, even though he knew now those rooms were empty in one way or another. Tombs or long abandoned refuge. No new door needed to be cut. It was too late. The silence greeted him every time, and half a kilometre led him to the second and third dead, two souls clasping hands, foreheads pressed together, tentacles almost intertwined.

Even through his numb stomach, Christopher’s insides tightened and he hurried by, eyes shut tight.

Blue light grew and flared beyond his eyelids, another lantern mingling with the brightness of his own. It was lifted towards Christopher’s face, though he could recognize the unique pattern of their footsteps and they could taste each other on the air.

“Little one.“

“Ehhka,” Christopher said.

Lowering the lamp, the historian smiled, but it was clear Ehhka’s carapace was sinking in, even with the multitude of sweaters and heavy fur coats hiding most of their starvation. It showed starkly in their eyes and caving throat. Ehhka reached forward and pulled the hood of Christopher’s own coat up, squishing his antennae forward.

They’d met a few times. Amiable and engaged in the ebb and flow of life, there was hardly a person who didn’t know at least one family member or friend who’d spoken with or knew of Ehhka beyond the anthologies they’d published. They interacted heavily with everyone at every opportunity and left the ship with every expedition to every planet’s surface, watching, documenting, interviewing.

More than the cartographers and biologists and every level of researcher he could imagine who’d also had the privilege – no, the curse – to journey across the universe with them, to whole other galaxies, Ehhka was like a living record of the trip.

“Have you found anyone?”

Christopher flicked a tentacle, _no_. Only ghosts.

They fell in step with one another, Christopher turning off his own lantern to conserve energy, Ehhka asking no questions, just providing quiet company. Walking forward to his friend’s cabin, he hoped he’d find the living soon enough.

Christopher didn’t know what happened yet and maybe the historian didn’t either. Only that their engineers, a group of nearly a thousand, were finding solutions. Well, finding solutions and starving and dying for cold exposure.

Yet when the entire vessel had been plunged into darkness so thick it felt like even your breath was smothered, Christopher had some suspicions. Even as an apprentice.

But then, almost everyone did.

They’d stopped moving. The first sign of trouble. And then came the race to find somewhere to land, that was amicable to life.

Something, Christopher thought, would have happened to one of the fuel modules. Something catastrophic, though he couldn’t imagine what, even as he trawled the depths of his memory for every lesson about the living city’s function. It wouldn’t have been recent, either. Every ship was built with so many redundancies they could operate longer than the initial systems allowed. The inciting catastrophe would have been many moon cycles ago. Uncharacteristically, the pilots had not addressed the crew about what. Transparency had disappeared more quickly than food.

Ehhka’s heavy arm landed on Christopher’s shoulder as they walked.

He wanted to say it. Wanted to tell them they were going to die here, trapped in a tin like a school of unlucky fish.

They could cut their way out, perhaps, but they had no way to ferry everyone to the surface. Without aid, a large breach in the hull would just drop the temperature even further.

And worse, something lurked below. Something cold, something apathetic, something _other_.

Yet something very much like them.

He’d seen the lights through the viewing screen as the ship drifted silently towards the blue planet, rich with water, its continents vast and broken. Lights speckling a sea of green and tan and grey. He’d seen the unmistakable patchwork of farmland. Vast road systems that surely harboured transit of some kind.

For a brief, relieving moment, seeing the stretch of civilization and the satellites that peppered the planet’s orbit, Christopher had thought it to be a poleepkwa outpost, a colony.

No. Indeed, it wasn’t the usual exo-fauna that waited for them below.

Whatever did, perhaps mere steps behind them technologically, was the greatest discovery in poleepkwa history. He could almost feel Ehhka's excitement the first time the old poleepkwa had found Christopher circling the same hallways, knocking on the same doors.

They’d discovered sapient life!

And yet they were still trapped in the tin.

And then the lights burned out, and the viewing screens burned out, and they were alone in that endless dark, the only operational technology that which pulled upon its own individual battery banks and the poleepkwa themselves. And no one particularly wanted to touch that which took energy from your own body to operate. Their lanterns, luckily, did not.

Eventually the silence began to irk him.

“Why haven’t they told us what’s happening?” he asked as they walked. “Have they told you?”

The silence continued long enough Christopher couldn’t help but wonder if honesty had fled they way morale had.

“They have,” Ehhka said just as Christopher was about to berate them.

“But-”

“To the people in the Great Hall. You can’t expect it to travel across the entire city.”

“Why not say anything before the power went off!” he cried, voice raspy.

“They sent messages to the surface. The exo-fauna hasn’t responded. Not before power was lost anyway. I suspect they’re scared to have us appear when there’s no evidence of interstellar travel here. I know I would be. Or maybe they never got the message at all.”

“Or are too stupid to decipher it,” Christopher muttered.

“That I doubt,” Ehhka said with a smile heard but not seen. “But we can’t know.”

“There has to be a way to get down there. The greatest minds of our culture can’t do something as simple as getting us onto the ground?” He knew he sounded childish, even to his own antennae, petulant and arrogant as a hatchling. As if he could solve the problem.

It was so frustrating, this impotence!

And maybe he should be going to the Great Hall, that cavernous public floor, to get the same news the rest of them were privy to.

He realized then that was what he’d begun to see everyone as. _Them_. A people apart, who were ceasing to exist little by little. Only this floor, and the shadows who dragged the sledges every time this new sun turned, remained real.

“It’s impossible to be prepared for all of life,” Ehhka said, but it only infuriated Christopher, and he pulled quickly away, wheeling to face the historian, their grey eyes turned blue by the flickering light, terribly sad, as if their spirit were shining through and trying to squirm free of a collapsing body.

“Millennia of travel,” Christopher snapped, not thinking that this might be the last time they ever saw one another. “And they weren’t prepared. That’s what’s killing us. That stupidity. I need to find my friend.”

His lantern flared to life and he ran as his own breath rattled and crackled in the frosted air.

“Ki! There’s news and it’s _useless_!”

No one answered. He nearly tripped over another corpse. The sledges hadn’t been up to stack bodies in so long, maybe there wasn’t anyone else to ferry them away anymore. Maybe even Ehhka had been nothing more than a ghost in a nightmare he was waiting to snap awake from.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I promise I’m still working on Atmosphere. I haven’t been feeling great about my writing, so decided to just do this as a bit of an aside until I cheer up.
> 
> You’ll notice how I still haven’t thought of a name for CJ. One day.
> 
> I can’t tell ya'll how much time I’ve spent picking apart the noises in the prawn language and frog calls and seeing how many I can reproduce and then assign English letters to. Do you know how many different ways a human voice can reproduce the K sound and what little subtleties and variations there are? A lot, if you mess around enough. xD 
> 
> Accidentally going to flood the D9 archive if I write anymore new stuff! Apologies in advance. Just wait til Small Fandom Fest rolls around again. It'll solve the problem.


	2. What Waits Below

“Ki, are you in here?”  
  
Christopher clutched the light even closer, cold steel digging into his chest, fear roaring in his head. In the complete silence, not even the wheeze of a weak breath, he edged forward, eyes half shut.   
  
“Ki? Ohge?”  
  
Forced to look, he let light flood the room.   
  
Two people sat together on their bunk, leaning into the wall, swaddled in blankets and coats. Even now, he could see the blood drained away from their eyes. Ohge’s were open, and their mate’s closed. He knew if he touched them their joints would be stiff like concrete, their tentacles frozen like an gruesome ice sculpture.   
  
Christopher flinched at the sound of a rattled breath and turned.   
  
His friend huddled on their own bunk, motionless and small, disguised beneath a thin hood and handmade scarf pulled up to their eyes.   
  
“We should move them.”  
  
“No,” Ki said, a single weak click.   
  
“Walking will warm you up.”   
  
Christopher slid into the bed beside Ki, pulling another blanket over both their heads, his breath gusting out, white mist that hung in the air. If Ki didn’t move, Christopher believed they might join their parents, then he’d be the one pulling them toward the sledge bearers, if ever those came.  
Whole halls were occupied by the dead. They didn’t know then, but would much later, that their population was cut almost in half, and their period of utter deprivation and starvation lasted four months and nine days measured by the Earth’s solar calendar. Nor could they know then, waiting for something to change, that this shadow was to persist another twenty eight years.  
  
But for the people of the old world, born off Earth, the memory of those four months and nine days would colour their lives forever, the pain to which all else was compared.   
  
Convinced that if the sledges came later and Christopher remained where he was, three bodies would be added to the pile instead of two. As Ki’s little shivers joined his own, ignoring Christopher’s pleading they go, he had the selfish impulse to just leave his friend behind in this ice box, return to his own where he’d built up a little fire, a little ritual to keep warm.   
  
Meanwhile, amid these selfish thoughts of abandonment, he thanked the spirits it wasn’t his own family less than a metre away, that they’d hated travel, feeling terrible for it. Was he a monster for thinking better you than me? It felt so.

Ki too was stupidly underdressed. So much so Christopher felt a surge of anger. 

When the sledges came, the coats the dead wore would become fuel for the acrid fires that warmed the ship. Better to steal them for Ki than for fires in the Great Hall, a place he wanted nothing to do with. Yet he couldn’t bring himself to strip Ki’s family of their warm clothes, their layers of thick fur coats and stiff mittens, to pile on top of what Ki already wore. Even if he wanted to. Even if Ki’s senselessness infuriated him. 

Not when they continued to stare forward as if as able to peer through the pitch black.

He pulled the smaller poleepkwa closer. They were an apprentice like Christopher, as were a third of the ship’s population. The two youth had made quick friends on the journey, working though they did in entirely different fields, exchanging stories about what they’d seen on expeditions, what Ki and his peers had dug up, which was always interesting when Christopher spent most of his time onboard, focusing on maintenance, seeing the worlds Ki described through the viewing screens. 

A skittering in the dark made both of them jump before reminding them of the hunger.

Most vermin had been hunted for food, those needle tailed, plated animals that roamed when the lights dimmed, feeding off the dead while the living fed off of them. You hated to stumble upon the dead if these carrion scavengers had arrived first. But some of the creatures still moved about in the dank shadows and the consuming silence. Only a second of thought was given to chasing it. They’d probably never find it. If they did they might be stung badly for the trouble.

At first, the poleepkwa’s own animals had survived off these scavengers, catching them on their own. But who had food to spare for work animals and pets? And as the vermin dwindled and fed the residents, the other animals starved. 

He still remembered the days they’d joked about having to eat a pet and the far-fetched stories of people who already had, long before the lights went out and the altitude turned the hallways in some places to the deepest cold season they could imagine. Now no one joked about such darkness. 

Since neither of them had the energy to chase those scorpion-like scavengers through the ship, hoping for a meal, nothing changed, Ki remained rooted to the bed hugging their knees with clouded eyes vacant with unseen grief. It had come for Ki’s parents. It had fled realizing the living were witness to its hunger and misery. 

Metal groaned. The hiss of wind streamed past, sweeping into the alcove. Though his anger warmed him, it also began to burn his empathy and patience away. 

So Christopher used his small light to find whatever water was remaining in the cabin, stuffed what blankets he could into a discarded backpack, and after receiving no acknowledgement whatsoever, scooped Ki into his arms, then stepped around the dead. He began the kilometre long walk to his own sleeping quarters the lantern swinging wildly around his wrist casting shadows like wraiths. 

Eventually, almost too tired to finish the trip, he put Ki down and assumed they’d follow, hobbling together the rest of the way. 

“I want to go to the main hall,” Ki said suddenly, sitting in a corner shortly after they arrived in Christopher's cabin. He'd always complained to himself it was too small. Small warmed quickly. Small had been a blessing.

Christopher tossed a blanket over, annoyed. “No. It’s just a disease pit.”

“It’s warm.” 

“This is warm,” he said, tiny fire coming to life in its ashy, tarnished bowl. The miniature laser which lit it, usually reserved for cutting, he slipped into a drawer where it would be easily found, momentarily dizzy.

“It’s cold here.” 

Christopher ignored him, pouring water into a metal container to heat over the coals that he fed with strips of his dwindling mattress pad, careful not to spill a drop. The mattress itself he leaned against the door to trap what heat they could, for the mechanisms to close it had been forced apart long ago.

“What do you think’s down there?” he asked after awhile, when orange light reflected on their faces and their clothing became infused with the smoke that tried to escape through the seams the mattress failed to seal.

Filling a cup with hot water he passed it to Ki before sitting back down with his own, pulling off his mittens to soak in as much warmth as possible. For a short while water tricked his stomach into thinking it was fed. Then reminded him what would happen when it finally ran out. 

“Everyone is,” Ki said dully, petulantly, believing it to be a stupid question because the campfires in the Great Hall, the second largest open space in the ship, roared in repurposed barrels. They’d gone down once, curious and hoping for answers that never came. “Because it’s warm.”

“I meant on the planet.”

“It’s us isn’t it? Why aren’t they helping?”

“Because it’s not us.”

“It has to be.”

“It’s not us.”

“How do you know?”

“I saw it on the viewing screens."

“What do they look like then?”

“I don’t know." 

“Then it’s us.”

“I don’t know why I bother with you sometimes,” Christopher said. 


End file.
